Chinese measures (度量衡, dùliànghéng, literally “length, capacity and weight”) are the traditional units in which the characters of wuxia fiction count their journeys, their silver and their hours. This page gathers the ones that recur in the novels. Units with enough to say about them have their own articles: Jin (weight) and Liang.
Two cautions apply throughout. The units were set by the state and reset by successive dynasties, so a figure given here is an approximation for the late imperial period unless an era is named. And the novels use many of them loosely: 千里 is “a thousand li” as a figure of speech far more often than as a surveyed distance.
How translations here treat them
| Unit | Chinese | Measures | On the page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Li | 里 | distance | kept as li |
| Chi, cun, zhang | 尺, 寸, 丈 | length | converted to feet and inches |
| Mu | 亩 | area | kept as mu |
| Jin, liang | 斤, 两 | weight, silver | kept as jin, liang |
| Shichen, ke | 时辰, 刻 | time | kept as shichen, ke |
| Incense stick | 一炷香 | time | translated: “an incense stick’s time” |
The retained units take no English plural: two li, three shichen, fifty liang.
Distance and length
Li (里, lǐ) is the unit of distance. It is usually glossed as about half a kilometre, or a third of a mile, which is its modern value; under most imperial dynasties it was somewhat longer. The li is kept in pinyin because it is the unit the whole genre travels in, and because a conversion would turn the conventional “ten thousand li” into a false precision.
Chi (尺, chǐ), the Chinese foot, was a little over an English foot in the Song, Ming and Qing, roughly 31 to 32 centimetres. Ten cun (寸, cùn) made a chi, and ten chi made a zhang (丈, zhàng). These three are converted in the translations here, because they map closely onto feet and inches and a reader gains nothing from the pinyin. The conversion follows the ratio rather than the digit: a chi is about thirteen inches, a cun about 1.3 inches, and a zhang is written as ten feet. The hyperbole 万丈 becomes “a hundred thousand feet”.
Two older measures survive mainly in set phrases: the bu (步), a pace of five chi, and the ren (仞), seven or eight chi, as in 壁立千仞 for a cliff that stands sheer.
Area
Mu (亩, mǔ) is the unit of land, a strip of field measured in square paces. It was about 600 square metres in the Qing and is 666.7 square metres today, roughly a sixth of an acre. A landlord’s wealth is counted in hundreds or thousands of mu.
Capacity
Grain was measured by volume. Ten sheng (升, shēng), each close to a litre, made a dou (斗, dǒu), and ten dou made a dan (石, read dàn in this sense). The hu (斛, hú) was also ten dou in origin, and was later reduced to five. Because the dan was so often a load of grain carried on a pole, it also served as a weight, conventionally a hundred jin; in that sense it is the unit English traders called the picul.
Weight and money
Weight has its own articles: Jin (weight), whose mass changed with the dynasty, and Liang, one-sixteenth of a jin and the unit in which silver was reckoned. Below the liang came the qian (钱, qián), one-tenth of a liang, fine enough for medicine and small sums of silver.
Everyday money was copper. The wen (文, wén) was a single copper cash, the coin with a square hole, and cash were strung on cords in nominal strings of a thousand (贯 guàn or 吊 diào), though a string in practice often held fewer. The rate between copper and silver moved with the market, which is why a character can be rich in silver and still short of small change.
Time
Shichen (时辰, shíchén) divides the day into twelve periods of two hours each. Each is named after one of the twelve earthly branches, and the translations here name them the same way: the hour of Zi, the hour of Wu.
| Branch | Chinese | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Zi | 子 | 11 pm to 1 am |
| Chou | 丑 | 1 am to 3 am |
| Yin | 寅 | 3 am to 5 am |
| Mao | 卯 | 5 am to 7 am |
| Chen | 辰 | 7 am to 9 am |
| Si | 巳 | 9 am to 11 am |
| Wu | 午 | 11 am to 1 pm |
| Wei | 未 | 1 pm to 3 pm |
| Shen | 申 | 3 pm to 5 pm |
| You | 酉 | 5 pm to 7 pm |
| Xu | 戌 | 7 pm to 9 pm |
| Hai | 亥 | 9 pm to 11 pm |
Half a shichen is an hour. The novels distinguish 小半个时辰, a little under half a shichen, from 大半个时辰, well over half.
The ke (刻, kè) is the smaller unit, originally one-hundredth of a day, about fourteen and a half minutes; from the early Qing it was fixed at a quarter of an hour.
The night was divided into five watches (更, gēng), announced by the watchman’s drum or clapper from nightfall to dawn. Each is about two hours, varying with the season, so “the third watch” is the dead of night around midnight, and “the fifth watch” is the last hour before dawn.
The novels also measure time by what can be done in it. An incense stick’s time (一炷香), the time a stick of incense takes to burn down, is kept as an image in the translations rather than converted to minutes; it is usually taken as about half an hour. The time it takes to drink a cup of tea (一盏茶) is shorter, a matter of minutes.
See also
External links
- Chinese units of measurement on Wikipedia
- Traditional Chinese timekeeping on Wikipedia